With Patreon's current structure, a patron pledges X, and the creators got somewhere between 85-93% of X. High, inconsistent fees are a common complaint. Also, patrons don't get billed until the next month - Patreon claims the #1 requested feature is up-front billing.

Patreon takes this feedback and implements a new payment scheme where:

Patrons pay the transaction fees - $0.35 + 2.9%.

Patrons pay the fees per pledge, not per payment.

I don't mind paying the transaction fee - it means that the creators get more money, great! It's that second change that fucks it all up.

Basically, if I have 10 $1 pledges per month, I'm paying $3.79.
If I have 1 $10 pledge per month, I'm paying $0.99. I, as a Patreon giver, am disincentivized to giving smaller amounts to many people, and would naturally either give up on Patreon or concentrate my giving to certain creators.

So, pretty much they fucked this up entirely, especially for those creators with lots of smaller pledges.

So that's a request from creators? Were creators delivering content and not getting paid for it under that loophole? Seems pretty serious ...

That is how I understand it. Patreon creators were getting "patrons" raising and lowering pledges to get access to exclusive content. Charging people upfront at least gets 1 month of higher payouts.

Once they were going to start up front payment, they ran into a possible problem. A patron would get charged up front for the month, but less than 1 month later, they'd get charged again for the next month, even if they pledged at the end of the month. So, they decided to break the "bill at the beginning of the month" cycle and bill monthly starting from whenever you pledged. It's a way to fix the problem, but one that maximizes costs for the patron.

It's hard to justify this "fix" was entirely about maximizing flexibility for creators instead of maximizing the fees Patreon could charge. Now, they've made both creators and patrons suspicious of Patreon's business model, even though they apologized and backed out.

Patreon responded to criticism by not fucking things up for everyone. On the whole, they seem embarrassed that someone noticed their cash grab before it was implemented and wish to pretend that hadn't happened.

Patreon responded to criticism by not fucking things up for everyone. On the whole, they seem embarrassed that someone noticed their cash grab before it was implemented and wish to pretend that hadn't happened.

Yes, after Patreon fucked up, they learned really quickly how badly, both through new feedback and customers dropping out. I can understand why they backed out so quickly and graciously.